The Telangana government released its Heatwave Action Plan (HAP) for 2025 on May 2. It comes on the heels of Telangana declaring heatwaves as a state-specific disaster last month. The declaration allows Telangana to access 10% of the State Disaster Response Funds to tackle heatwaves. These are great developments amid the scorching temperatures Hyderabad has been witnessing.
At a broad level, this HAP lists the measures different line departments must take. For instance, the Health Department must ensure medical centres are equipped with facilities to treat heat strokes. Chalivendrams (free drinking water stands) must be set up for public use. The Labour Department must direct employers to change work hours for outdoor and factory workers to cooler parts of the day. All these measures are directory without any legal backing. Line departments and district administrators carry out these measures based on ad hoc annual action plans.
Unfortunately, the measures under the HAP barely hit the mark.
A narrow approach to heat relief
The HAP was made by Telangana’s Revenue (Disaster Management) Department with inputs from line departments, the Telangana Development Planning Society (TGDPS), the India Meteorological Department (IMD), and UNICEF's Hyderabad field office. There were no inputs from the people who experience and struggle with heat daily. As a result, the peoples’ actual needs don’t figure in the HAP.
Currently, Hyderabad’s heatwave relief measures depend on the temperature breaching the 40-degree Celsius mark. Once breached, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) and other government departments implement measures under the HAP.
This policy assumes people are safe and comfortable below the 40-degree mark. That’s a problem. Listening to workers can tell us how debilitating working and living in the heat can be, even below the 40-degree mark.
Workers’ experiences push us to think about the three aspects that make someone vulnerable to heat:
(i) how exposed they are to heat,
(ii) how economically and physiologically sensitive their livelihood is to heat stress and shocks, and
(iii) whether they have the means to adapt to heat stress and shocks.
Thinking around these questions, the government must plan heat relief in the larger context of a person’s livelihood and vulnerability.
Heat as a livelihood challenge
Hyderabad functions because a large informal workforce sustains it. Sanitation and gig/platform workers are a significant part of this workforce. Their experiences illustrate how heat accentuates the issues already plaguing informal workers’ livelihoods.
These workers spend anywhere between 10 and 15 hours outdoors at work. Their earnings are meager—between Rs 530 and 1,200 a day. They are left with barely any money after spending on travel, living, and essential family expenses. Any disruption to their livelihood comes as a severe shock. Yet, these workers are the most exposed and the least protected from harmful weather.
A delivery worker in Begumpet described how harrowing working in the summer is. He said, “Sweat drips from our foreheads in the summer. Heat from the seat, from the engine, from up above. The bottom gets cooked. Heat hits us on our helmets. We get nosebleeds”.
This experience reflects most outdoor workers’ experiences of working in the heat. Unfortunately, the workers have no choice but to work in these hazardous conditions for a daily wage.
An elderly woman in Moula Ali working as a GHMC sanitation worker frames this inevitability: “We get heat strokes, but we can’t help it. It is a daily duty. We take leave if we are too sick. Otherwise, we go. If we miss a day, we lose Rs 530.”
The thunderstorms that follow extreme heat days add to the issue. The same gig worker explained, “In the rain we fall sick sometimes… That is also a concern. But if we don’t work normally we don’t get any money.”
Apart from health concerns, gig/platform workers deal with frequent vehicle breakdowns and horrific traffic conditions in the rain. Sanitation workers work in the same rain with poor quality equipment, risking their safety and health.
Left in the lurch
The government has policies that could help these groups stay safe. But the policies are so out of touch with the peoples’ realities that they become useless.
For instance, sanitation workers have ESI cover that provides subsidised healthcare. The workers can also obtain sick leave prescriptions from an ESI hospital to rest without losing pay. But sanitation workers say they live far away from the two ESI hospitals in Hyderabad. The time and effort it takes to travel to one of the two ESI hospitals in the city when they are sick makes this option unviable.
The situation is even more dire for gig and platform workers who work without any policy protections. When asked how they cope, a gig delivery worker in Begumpet said, “We come and lie down on the road.” The company doesn’t give them any facilities. “They don’t even give us water. No place to sit. No place to park. No washroom. No charging spots for our phones,” he said. He and his colleagues wait on the roads for their next order. Some might find a public park where they can rest for a while.
The workers say they have raised these concerns to the government directly or through their unions. But they lament that, mostly, nobody is paying attention.
Saraswati K, president, Safai Karmachari Andolan said the government doesn’t have any intention to bring a change. “Their priority is sanitation. They are not concerned about it,” she said.
The Telangana Gig and Platform Workers Union (TGPWU) founder and president, Shaik Salauddin, helped gig and platform workers find some success in making their demands heard. He said persistent advocacy and timely campaigning before the government and cab aggregators helped get mere basic infrastructure like restrooms at the Hyderabad airport.
Climate relief must enhance peoples’ dignity
The workers experiencing this distress have a few straightforward needs to tackle the heat. These suggestions come from interviews with 27 men and 14 women in Hyderabad working as sanitation workers, gig and platform workers, street vendors, auto drivers, or living in slums. Their needs can be put into five categories.
Better public infrastructure: Facilities that can offer critical respite from heat and rain on main roads and by-lanes. This includes infrastructure that can give respite from the heat, like roadside sheds, community parks, usable, accessible, and gender-sensitive public washrooms, and auto stands. Some workers, such as gig/platform workers and auto drivers, also ask for roads with better drainage so their vehicles don’t get damaged during thunderstorms.
Better work conditions: Workers want better basic amenities like water, toilets, and rest areas. They need flexible work hours that balance their duty with their health and well-being, without being forced to work despite ill-health or hazardous work conditions. They want well-defined workloads so they aren’t overexploited at work, especially in the summer. They want reliable and durable equipment that can protect them at work.
Decent daily income: Workers ask for rationalised auto meter fares, rationalised penalties and fines, and stable pay for eight hours of work that match today’s living costs. This is not simply a want for more money. It is a need for income to afford a water cooler instead of coping with a ceiling fan. Or afford taking a sick day off to recover instead of working despite a heat stroke.
Better public services: Affordable medical care without travelling for miles and reliable last-mile public transport that gets them close to where they need to be. Again, these are not wants for luxury. These are pleas for care when they sometimes have to walk or travel kilometres in the heat to reach a clinic or a bus stand.
Social security: They also seek better and accessible health cover and income security to support them when incapacitated by the heat.
None of the measures sought by them are pathbreaking or futuristic. They are all measures we wish for ourselves to live a basic, dignified life. We must give our workers the same dignity. The GHMC, other government authorities, and employers need only commit to this.
Srikara Prasad is a postgraduate student of MA Development at Azim Premji University, Bengaluru.
This piece draws from a larger field study the author conducted with informal sector workers, government officials, and civil society organisation representatives in November and December 2024.
Views expressed are the author’s own.